Search Results

This chapter introduces the history of infrastructural exclusion. In the early 1900s, retail grocers established nimble ways to extend supply chains from downtown wholesale districts into dispersed urban neighborhoods and into inner-ring suburbs. In search of competitive advantages, some firms bypassed wholesalers and replaced storage facilities in the urban center with their own regional distribution centers. The transformation of the retail food system around the movement of higher volumes and more varieties to more places heightened uncertainty and competition and led to wide-ranging economic mistakes and bankruptcies. As infrastructural interdependencies extended into new suburban territories, they also excluded areas, leaving behind urban neighborhoods and inner-ring suburbs that were dependent on older models of food distribution and market coordination. This process of infrastructural exclusion gave rise to the urban food deserts of the 1970s.

This chapter analyzes the labor movement’s challenge to retail giant Wal-Mart, which in 2002 announced plans to open forty Supercenters in California—threatening to undermine labor standards, and union strength, in the grocery sector. It focuses on the confrontation with Wal-Mart in the separately incorporated city of Inglewood, a historically working-class African American community in South Los Angeles. There, a community-labor coalition, led by LAANE, organized to stop Supercenter development through legislative and legal challenges—a technique known as a “site fight” because it aimed to block Wal-Mart at a specific location. The chapter examines three phases of the fight, tracing how the coalition mobilized law to defeat the Inglewood proposal, design innovative policies to limit Wal-Mart’s entry into the Los Angeles market, and thwart Wal-Mart’s effort to bypass those policies by opening a small-format grocery store in historic Chinatown. In evaluating the campaign, the chapter suggests that the outcome was, in part, a product of Wal-Mart’s political miscalculation: The company’s drive for a Supercenter in Inglewood failed despite evidence of public support, in large measure because of an ill-conceived attempt to gain voter approval through a city initiative that would have completely circumvented the local planning process. Yet Wal-Mart’s defeat was not merely self-inflicted. The company’s miscalculation of the local response to the initiative was politically consequential precisely because there was a sophisticated team of activists and lawyers who used Wal-Mart’s disregard of public input to successfully mobilize community opposition to the Supercenter and build new anti-big-box policy. In that sense, the presence of a political-legal support structure, with experience mounting development-oriented campaigns from the community benefits context, was essential to Wal-Mart’s defeat—strengthening grocery labor standards in Los Angeles going forward.

This chapter focuses on how the grocery industry has managed so far in post-Katrina New Orleans. It begins with the publication on yahoo.com on August 30, 2005, of two photographs showing people wading through the floodwaters, both carrying groceries. The only difference between them was that one was of a young black man, while the other was of two young white adults. It was the captioning of both photographs, however, that caught the public eye, as the African American man is said to have “looted” from a grocery, whereas the white couple merely “found” their bread and soda in the same store, the Circle Food Store — a store that has yet to reopen three years after the storm. This whole episode raises questions that are specific to New Orleans, but have much wider implications about the relationship of food access to urban development. This chapter thus explores the political, social, and economic significance of the number of neighborhood markets that were created in New Orleans as a response to Hurricane Katrina.